5 Better Web Design Tips for Beginners

A professionally designed website will make it easier for users to find what they are searching for on the Internet. Keeping the search engines in mind when designing your website will help increase return visitors. A well designed website also provides a more pleasant user experience, and the amount of user engagement indicates to search engines how popular your website should be.

Make sure that the design is neat and well organized. Your choice of colors in your web design should be well-planned for increased efficiency and improved readability. Any web designer must focus on both the design, function, and placement of content in order to consider a given website to be effective.

If you fail to plan the structure of your website around your audience, then your design will be rejected by even the untrained web surfer. Creating a well-designed website is not difficult when the appropriate aspects of good design are carefully considered: graphics, spaces, color plan and fonts. Here are some better web design tips for beginners that will help you to create a better web design to attract visitors to your website:

Your Website Should be Easy to Read

A better website needs to be easily readable. To be effective, the written content on your website should be simple, yet engaging. Text on a website should encourage the users eyes to flow effortlessly from one idea to the next.

As a designer, fonts are one of the most powerful tools in sending your message. The most common mistakes for designers is the incorrect choice of font sizes. Text that is too small is difficult to see. Text that is too large decreases legibility. A good rule of thumb for paragraph text size is 14 pixels. Adjust the size of your heading accordingly,

Secondly, the line height of paragraph text is an easy oversight for many designers. Line spacing helps prevent the user becoming intimidated by a wall of text, while helping with aesthetics. Ideally, set the line height of your paragraph tags to 1.5em.

Keep your font choices readable and elegant on your website. Google Web Fonts is the best way to choose the correct font on your website. Google’s Web Fonts contain a large collection of professional-looking fonts and they are frequently updated to include new additions.

Keep Website Graphics Small

Graphics of your website should never be too large. Large graphics reduce the amount of space that is available for other important content. Smaller images enable you to use images to enhance the content of your web page without overwhelming the user.

Many people only think about the visual aspect of a web page without having any thoughts of performance when published on the Internet. Large images and too many graphics take too much time to download and frustrate users. Try to keep the file size of your graphics as small as possible. To do this, only use lossless compression formats (such as .gif and .png) when absolutely necessary.

If possible, try to keep the size of your web pages to under at least 1 MB, preferably under 500 K. Images are usually the largest parts of a web page as far as file sizes are concerned. Mobile Internet connections are still fairly slow. Even the faster connections take a while to download over 1 MB files. Remember, large file sizes mean longer download times. Longer download times equals unhappy users.

Effectively Use Whitespace

White space on your website is very important. White space simply refers to the areas of a web page that contain no content, images, or any other media. The space doesn’t truly need to be white in color – any color will do.

White space should lead your website visitor through the content of your page and help to emphasize some sections more than others. Spacing around images allows the image to stand aside from written content while providing a supplement to the information contained on the page.

Use simple and easy Navigation Techniques

Your website must be linked properly to allow search engines to find all of the web pages located on your site. The use of text links enable both users and search engines to easily navigate throughout your entire website. Ensure that they are working (not dead links) without the occurrence of any 404 errors.

Most websites have navigation bars that use CSS or JavaScript. These kinds of navigation menus are great for the user experience. However, search engines or users without JavaScript enabled may be unable to use these kinds of links to navigate through your site.

The proper use of a search feature is another way to help users navigate your website. People use these options to find what they are looking for without using traditional links. When used appropriately, the inclusion of a search feature can contribute to the overall design of a web page. Google offers a search plugin that allows webmasters to embed a Google search form directly on their site.

Incorporate a Responsive Design

A responsive website is one the adapts to different screen sizes using CSSand JavaScript. The components of a responsive web page grow and shrink depending on the size of the browser’s viewing area. Responsive designs prevent Internet users on mobile devices from needing to zoom to view content.

An alternative to a responsive website is having several different versions of the same website. Each version is optimized for a small range of screen sizes. In the end, there would be a mobile version for phones, a version for tablets, and a version for desktops and laptops.

Regardless of the route you choose, adapting your website to multiple screen sizes has become pretty standard. The use of cell phones and tablets to access the Internet continues to grow at an exponential rate. Failure to keep mobile users in mind may prevent you from engaging a large portion of your audience.

Summary

Now you know some basic web design tips and how you can use it to create a better website. There are many ways available in web designing when it comes to increasing efficiency and usability. Keeping things simple is usually the best rule of thumb.